Fifth Anniversary of Beeminder

Friday, November 18, 2016

By bsoule

It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 whole years since we were slamming red bull on dirty couches in a college-town garage, with our friends Sergei and Mark, moving fast and breaking things on our scrappy little startup, dreaming big about how we were going to change the world(wide web) with …

Oh wait. I mean, 5 years since we publicly launched Beeminder.
That’s really nothing like how it went down.
(We do persist in breaking things though.
Biggest self-inflicted disaster of the last year?
Probably
upgrading our ORM —
a massive code-base-wide undertaking.)
How did it really go down?
Well, we’ve talked about that plenty:
zero,
one,
two,
three,
four.

Behind the scenes of Beeminder there’s been a ton of work, like server infrastructure and cleaning out our codebase.
Bethany
migrated
us to a new ORM (for non-nerds, this is a similar amount of work to packing your entire house and then unpacking it all again),
cloudified our storage of graphs, and
learned a whole bunch of stuff about dev-ops, like fully scripting the deployment of a fresh instance of Beeminder so that if/when the data center serving up our humble website disappears in a ball of fire we’re a few clicks away from making it all reappear like a phoenix in some less incendiary location.

Other highly visible changes include a
revamping of our premium plans.
Beeminder is still free if you stay on track towards your goals but you can no longer create an unlimited number of goals without getting on our cheapest premium plan.
Also new is a charity option in our most expensive premium plan.
In sadder news, we officially ended our Beekeeper life-coaching plan.
As we said in the announcement of the new plans, we’ll focus on what we’re best at — building very nerdy tools — and leave lifecoaching to the lifecoaches.

The splashiest new newness, of course, is the
redesign we launched in October
(see also our
beehind-the-scenes
look at it).
It puts a strong emphasis on a list-view of your goals, giving you individual data entry right from the list, and trying to bring the relevant info — how much and how soon — into the forefront for newbees.

Finally, though most are too minor to be noteworthy, we made 365 User-Visible Improvements to Beeminder in the past 365 days.
And in fact over 2000 UVIs in the past 2000 days.
It’s been over 1000 days — almost 3 years — since we’ve failed to
tweet a UVI
in time and paid one of you $1000.
We’re probably overdue and in fact could cough that $1000 up many times and have it all still be thoroughly worth it.

The State of the Bee

At the beginning of 2016, your friendly neighborhood Beeminder founders
committed
to the unthinkable:
getting day jobs if we couldn’t make revenue grow in 2016.
We were already profitable but just barely and needed a kick in the pants, so we gave ourselves one.
Of course we beemind myriad inputs to growing Beeminder — user-visible improvements, blog posts, hours of work,
tocks, etc — but beeminding outputs, like revenue, is harder.
So we tried it the old-fashioned way and put ourselves on the hook by publicly announcing some dire consequences for failing to make Beeminder grow.
Our main strategy here was the premium revamp to get more hardcore folks paying monthly, and the redesign, to keep most newbees from fleeing in terror upon loading the site.

Note the nice jump in revenue which means our 2016 commitment device has paid off and Beeminder will flourish into 2017 and beeyond:

We’ve been aided immensely in the push to grow faster by having Andy Brett come back in full force.
And as of last month we have
Lillian Karabaic as Minister of the Exterior — i.e., marketing and finance — which, it’s abundantly clear, is about to translate into more revenue growth.

Finally, we also added Alice Harris, aka Alys, this year, as Habitica Liaison.
She both helps improve the Beeminder-Habitica integration and, like all of us, helps with support.
Habitica, thanks to Alys, is now tied with
CollegeInfoGeek
as our top source of new Beeminder users.

This all makes our team sound bigger than it is though.
Only Danny and Bee and occasionally Andy are full-time.
Changing that is our biggest incentive to keep revenue growing.

Most Important Thing

The last couple years we put ourselves on the hook for some set of features / milestones we were going to reach before the year was up.
That led to getting things done, but also scrambling last minute and of course, breaking things.

Danny’s been stuck all year on taming his email as his Most Important Thing, the bane of the CEO role.
But Bethany, the CTO, i.e, the one who actually builds everything, worked on
upgrading all the things
and paid out a max pledge of $270 to a lucky user.
Then came
weekends off
which only went as high as $30 paid.
The
premium revamp
also only went as high as $30 paid (final pledge $90), and Bee’s current Most Important Thing is
server infrastructure.
Keep an eye on that one and if she falls behind you can currently earn $90 out of her pocket.

Favorite Blog Posts (and a New Forum Category)

Finally, if you’ve made it this far and just can’t stand to see this blog post end, let us make some suggestions of our greatest hits for this year, and you can go stroll down memory lane.
It’ll be almost like reading a never-ending story.

Start Here

Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.

Akrasia

Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia